VOC gulden 1786 Westfriesland mint

Description

VOC is the acronym in Dutch for United East India Company, which was a private company chartered by the Dutch government to conduct colonizing activity, which included local diplomacy and military activity.All of the chartered colonizing companies got into financial difficulties at the end of the 18th century. The VOC was bought out and nationalized by the Dutch government in 1799.

The Netherlands emerged in the 16th century when the the people fought against and eventually broke away from Spain. The country embarked on a career of colonial exploitation around the world, made a lot of money, lost most of it to the British during the Napoleonic wars. A constitutional monarchy was established after the fall of Napoleon.

The political arrangements that resulted in the nations of modern Europe began to emerge out of anarchy starting in the 7th century AD or so. Europe, for our purposes stretches from Greenland to somewhere in Russia. Collectors of Europe would likely include Russia. Collectors of Asia, even though about 2/3 of Russia is in Asia, probably not.

By “Modern World Coins” we mean here, generally, the round, flat, shiny metal objects that people have used for money and still do. “Modern,” though, varies by location. There was some other way they were doing their economies, and then they switched over to “modern coins,” then they went toward paper money, now we’re all going toward digital, a future in which kids look at a coin and say “What’s that?” We’ll say: “We used to use those to buy things.” Kids will ask “How?” The main catalog reference is the Standard Catalog of World Coins, to which the KM numbers refer.